Gauraa Shekhar – Maudlin House

Nerve and Constraint: An Interview with Chris Andrews

Gauraa ShekharJune 4, 2021

To reduce a César Aira book to its plot is a disheartening exercise in futility. The Divorce—Aira’s fifty-second novel, and his tenth translated into English by...

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A Feeling of Intimate Collaboration Between Reader and Writer: An Interview with Meg Pokrass

Gauraa ShekharMay 28, 2021

Featuring sixty-seven stories that span over a decade, Spinning to Mars dangles between the promise of a ride and the promise of home. The eighth collection fro...

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The World Through A Poet’s Eyes: An Interview with Dani Putney

Gauraa ShekharApril 30, 2021

Dani Putney’s Salamat sa Intersectionality is a raw and tender interrogation of identity. Divided into three panels—‘Youthful Absolution’, ‘Salted Pores’, and ‘...

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A Shape-Shifting Flow Morphs Into its Final Form: An Interview with Christine Shan Shan Hou

Gauraa ShekharApril 23, 2021

The latest collection from Christine Shan Shan Hou is smart, evocative, and at times so quiet, you can hear the sound of a thought forming, and then evaporating...

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Dim the Lights and Share a Viewing Experience: An Interview with Gina Nutt

Gauraa ShekharApril 16, 2021

“Can a chainsaw be a god? A masked person’s bare hands?” Featuring eighteen essays that braid together memoir and criticism, Gina Nutt’s debut collection Nig...

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I Villainize Myself: An Interview With Shy Watson

Gauraa ShekharApril 2, 2021

There are few collections as charming as Shy Watson’s Horror Vacui (House of Vlad, 2021). Divided into three sections—Poems, Waking Dreams, and Quarantine Diari...

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A New Kind of Poetics to Get Us Closer to Progress: An Interview with Michael Chang

Gauraa ShekharFebruary 26, 2021

Michael Chang knows how to stay vulnerable to the reader without taking themself too seriously. In DRAKKAR NOIR, the poet’s forthcoming chapbook from Bateau Pre...

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Hell Is Other People’s Certainty: An Interview with Rachel Genn

Gauraa ShekharFebruary 19, 2021

Rachel Genn’s second novel, What You Could Have Won (And Other Stories, 2020), chronicles a well-worn path to fame. After a crucial misstep in his career, faili...

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The Process of Writing Is Necessarily Invasive: An Interview with Lucie Elven

Gauraa ShekharFebruary 12, 2021

The Weak Spot is the first novel from Lucie Elven and Soft Skull Press ushers it into our lives at precisely the right time. A young woman relocates to an isola...

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Cowboyism Is a School of Thought Begging to Be Broken Down: An Interview with Matt Mitchell

Gauraa ShekharJanuary 29, 2021

I first found Matt Mitchell’s work in 2020: A Meat Loaf-quoting, love-struck poem that made me homesick for summers in a town I’ve never visited. That same warm...

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Increasingly Intense and Claustrophobic: An Interview with Madeleine Watts

Gauraa ShekharJanuary 15, 2021

As we begin to steady ourselves in another year rife with unsteady circumstances, a parallel urgency emerges within. The questions arrive slowly, then in quick ...

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Real Life is Dangerous All of the Time: An Interview with Elle Nash

Gauraa ShekharJanuary 8, 2021

“The thing about credit is that interest stacks,” writes Elle Nash in “Define Hungry”—one of several stories in her debut collection that grapple with being ali...

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Into Liberatory Futures: An Interview with Chris Martin

Gauraa ShekharDecember 11, 2020

The pains of heaven, the pleasures of hell, imaginary homelands, livestock auctions, naked internet oceans—in his latest collection, Things to Do in Hell (Coffe...

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Our Mother Tongue Creates Displacement: An Interview with Jenny Hval

Gauraa ShekharNovember 28, 2020

Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God reads as an imagistic compendium of surrealist cinema and subcultural manifesto. The text follows a self-proclaimed provincial go...

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Lining Up Domino Pieces: An Interview with Charlotte Barslund

Gauraa ShekharNovember 20, 2020

While the timing of its English publication is embarrassingly relevant, Vigdis Hjorth’s Long Live the Post Horn! offers welcomed relief: an existential crisis o...

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No Voice Was Expendable: An Interview with Will Johnson

Gauraa ShekharNovember 13, 2020

Though you might recognize Will Johnson as the voice behind Denton-based band Centro-Matic, his debut novel warrants a distinction of its own merit. If or When ...

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Come Wait in Line and Buy Some Books: An Interview with ‘Strand Bookseller’ Brett Bates

Gauraa ShekharOctober 30, 2020

On August 23, a week after Prime Day, Nancy Bass Wyden, the third-generation owner of New York’s iconic Strand Book Store, took to Twitter. “We need your help,”...

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Weaving in the Warped: An Interview with Jules Archer

Gauraa ShekharOctober 23, 2020

The women in Jules Archer’s Little Feasts are hungry. They’re chowing down on fat slices of tempeh, ripping napkins apart while watching the Investigation Disco...

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A Kind of Kinship in Pain: An Interview with Brian Evenson

Gauraa ShekharOctober 16, 2020

Brian Evenson’s words unsteady the best of readers. They stretch circumstance to convey the uncertain and unsettling; they confuse, morph; lead you to a room in...

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The Places We Leave Aren’t Static: An Interview with Gwen Goodkin

Gauraa ShekharOctober 9, 2020

In many ways, Gwen Goodkin’s A Place Remote is about belonging: a dissatisfied optometrist confronts the life choices he’s made; a high school student travels t...

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Exit Tangibility: An Interview with Jamie Marina Lau

Gauraa ShekharOctober 2, 2020

Jamie Marina Lau wrote her debut novel over two months, in a state of trance, at the age of nineteen. The result was Pink Mountain on Locust Island, a rapturou...

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Section Breaks Felt Like Benches: An Interview with Nicolette Polek

Gauraa ShekharSeptember 24, 2020

A divine symmetry emerges quietly in Nicolette Polek’s debut collection. Imaginary Museums exhibits twenty-six compact short stories, categorized into four dist...

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Each Story Functions as a Specific Sound: An Interview with Ashleigh Bryant Phillips

Gauraa ShekharSeptember 18, 2020

Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’ debut collection won the 2020 C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize, and it’s no surprise why: Sleepovers is at once dark and allur...

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A Very Different Landscape: An Interview with Diane Cook

Gauraa ShekharSeptember 2, 2020

To call The New Wilderness a work of dystopian fiction would be a bit of a stretch. Diane Cook’s debut novel sedulously navigates motherhood in the prospect of ...

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Building Normalcy with a Ring of Fascination Around It: An Interview with Tara Isabel Zambrano

Gauraa ShekharAugust 27, 2020

Details accrue quietly in Tara Isabel Zambrano’s debut collection — in the click-clack of a neighbor’s stilettos, in yolk that clings to the fractured shell of ...

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Chains of Causality Intersecting: An Interview with Nick Olson

Gauraa ShekharAugust 21, 2020

Nick Olson’s debut novel occupies an important space in the psyche of American fiction. Spanning sixteen years in the life of Waldo Collins—who isn’t quite Hold...

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Going Where the Pleasure Is: An Interview with Mary South

Gauraa ShekharAugust 14, 2020

Mary South’s debut collection You Will Never Be Forgotten (FSG Originals, 2020) is a stunning compendium of enormous emotions and imagistic writing. Whether we’...

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More Radical Visions, More Radical Acts: An Interview with Deb Olin Unferth

Gauraa ShekharAugust 7, 2020

Deb Olin Unferth’s Barn 8 (Graywolf Press, March 2020) is a book eight years in the making, and the time and care of each of those years is tangible on the page...

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Alignments to Guide the Reader: An Interview with Dima Alzayat

Gauraa ShekharJuly 31, 2020

Dima Alzayat’s excellent debut collection Alligator (Picador/Two Dollar Radio) pushes the parameters of hybrid-American identity with stories about hurt, loss, ...

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Focusing On Anything Except the World Unraveling: An Interview with Hilary Leichter

Gauraa ShekharJuly 24, 2020

I connected with Hilary Leichter earlier this year, when she made an exciting offer on Twitter: if followers were to DM her a receipt of a debut book purchased ...

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